Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image recording method and a set.
Description of the Related Art
Although an ink jet technique has been applied to the field of office printers or home printers, there has been a demand for realizing POD (print on demand) in recent years, and its application to a field of commercial printing is expected. In this commercial printing field, feeling of printing like that of general-purpose printing paper is required. As a printing method for obtaining an image similar to a printed article having feeling of printing, a method of directly recording an image on a recording medium has been proposed. In addition, there has been proposed a method of first forming an intermediate image on an intermediate transfer member by an ink jet device and then transferring the intermediate image on the intermediate transfer member to a desired recording medium to form a final image (transfer ink jet printing method).
On the other hand, there is a demand for a technique capable of recoding at a higher speed than before. In this respect, it is known to enable image recording at a high speed by aggregating an ink. According to this method, a polyvalent metal salt or an acidic buffer solution is used to cause an aggregation reaction between these substances and an anionic composition contained in the ink, thereby forming an aggregate product.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-10633 discloses an ink set for ink jet recording which contains an ink containing a pigment and a liquid composition for aggregating the ink, wherein one of the ink and the liquid composition is made alkaline, and the other is made acidic. Besides the aggregation method utilizing a neutralization reaction between an acid and an alkali, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H10-216739 discloses that a nonionic compound which is a surfactant having a polyoxyalkylene unit is aggregated with tannic acid.